


silence crawls with every word

by biblionerd07



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fake Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loneliness, Platonic Soulmates, lying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 14:37:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20259703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biblionerd07/pseuds/biblionerd07
Summary: Just because he's not actually dead doesn't mean she doesn't miss him.





	silence crawls with every word

**Author's Note:**

> I know the finale isn't going to play out this way but I just had a lot of Feelings about Joan being the only one who knew Sherlock was alive and still grieving because she misses him.

Joan has to plan a funeral. She didn’t think about that in all their scheming and all their contingencies. She’s the only one who could, of course; Morland and Mycroft are both gone. Though, she realizes, even if they weren’t, it would probably fall to her. The Holmes men could never be accused of being involved in the minutia of each other’s lives. Picturing Morland inviting SuckingChestWound anywhere almost makes Joan laugh out loud inappropriately.

Marcus would handle the funeral, she knows, if she asked him to, but Marcus wouldn’t know who all should be invited, either. He’s met a lot of Sherlock’s Irregulars, but he doesn’t know about C, and he wouldn’t know how to track down a lot of Sherlock’s eccentric circle of misfits.

Joan had called the Irregulars the Island of Misfit Toys once. Sherlock hadn’t gotten the reference, and that Christmas she made him watch the Claymation Rudolph. He’d spent the next four weeks trying his hand at Claymation. He turned out to be pretty good at it, just like he is at everything.

It’s lucky she’s always been such a private person, especially when it comes to her emotions, so she doesn’t have to explain herself about why she doesn’t seem sad enough. Ironically, Sherlock would be the only one who would be able to tell. She _is_ sad. She isn’t death-sad, but hearing the gunshot and the ensuing splash had still made her heart leap into her throat, even knowing it was staged. It hurts that she didn’t get to see him before he left to make sure he really is okay.

“Sherlock is dead,” she says aloud, just to test it. She doesn’t like saying it. She knows it isn’t true, but the weight of the sentence on her tongue feels wrong. She’s always rejected her mother’s superstitions, prided herself on being logical and scientific, but she can’t help the little shudder that goes through her after she says it. Like she jinxed him. She doesn’t even believe in fate, not really, but just now she snaps her mouth shut so she doesn’t tempt it any further.

Marcus squeezes her shoulder. “We’ll get through this,” he says, bags under his eyes belying how hard this is hitting him. That makes tears well up in Joan’s eyes, more than testing out that sentence. Joan knows it isn’t true, but Marcus doesn’t. He came into work yesterday with bloodshot eyes and here he is, trying to comfort her while she lies through her teeth.

She wishes she didn’t have to lie. To Marcus and the Captain, especially. She feels guilty, looking at their pain, but between their pain or Sherlock’s life, it isn’t a hard choice. Kitty comes right away, Archie blinking sleepily from the jet lag. But Kitty isn’t crying. She’s defiantly disbelieving.

“I won’t believe it until I’ve see him in the morgue myself,” she says hotly. Joan turns on Sherlock’s surveillance music (volume four) just to be safe, and she tells Kitty the truth. Sherlock was adamant that Kitty not be left in the dark. Not that Joan would have anyway. Marcus and Captain Gregson need plausible deniability, and Joan’s willing to perjure herself to put Odin away and for Sherlock’s sake, but that’s a lot to ask two career cops.

(Not that Gregson hasn’t proven himself willing to lie before. Not that Joan still lies awake thinking about that sometimes.)

Kitty and Archie stay at the brownstone for weeks. It makes sense, in terms of the ruse. Kitty would, if this were real, and it’s nice to have company. Having Archie around is its own kind of happiness. He’s a smart little kid, with big, inquisitive eyes. Sherlock would be proud to see how much the little boy observes without anyone else noticing. Joan remembers, with a little pang, all that time she spent thinking she might be a mother, and the lengths Sherlock went to in preparation. She doesn’t really think about it anymore.

The funeral is awful. All the people saying, “So sorry for your loss” blend together. It doesn’t even mean anything. Joan thinks if it were true, if he had died, she would end up screaming at all these people. But she just smiles and nods and thanks them. She stands with Marcus on one side and Kitty on the other, Captain Gregson just down the line and looking over at her every few minutes to check on her, and she squeezes Kitty's hand whenever she feels too murderous. Alfredo keeps bringing her food and watching her until she eats it. Archie gets bored in minutes and takes his shoes off under the table. Joan wishes she could, too.

At least she doesn’t have to explain the lack of a body. The divers are still looking, but Joan told everyone she wanted to have the funeral now for closure. Sherlock wouldn’t have survived losing that much blood. They tested the blood on the bridge, and it came back as his, of course. Marcus and Captain Gregson just think he’s in pieces somewhere, smashed along some jagged rocks and eaten by animals.

The thought turns Joan’s stomach, so she pushes it away. She knows he’s fine. Well, that might be a stretch. She doesn’t actually know he’s fine. She doesn’t even know where he is. But she knows he’s _alive_, and at this point that’s all she cares about.

She wakes up the morning after the funeral to see all the screens in the media room blinking at her. It takes her a few fuzzy, half-asleep moments before she remembers why she's sleeping in the media room. It isn't some sadness that propelled her here, not really; she fell asleep watching TV, because it's oddly quiet now. Sherlock is only one person, but he takes up a lot of space. The brownstone feels empty and quiet and she can't stand it. Suddenly, she realizes the screens are blinking in Morse code. Her heart leaps as she settles her brain enough to pay attention, but then she slumps in disappointment.

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E L-O-S-T A-N A-D-M-I-R-A-B-L-E A-L-L-Y. F-O-R-E-V-E-R A-T Y-O-U-R S-E-R-V-I-C-E.

It’s not like Sherlock’s love of Morse code is a secret. And of course he couldn’t use the internet to contact her. That’s just about the least safe way he could’ve done it. Reichenbach will be looking for any whisper of Sherlock, not to mention his contacts at the NSA.

As the weeks pass, Joan thinks she might be going a little crazy. She has to keep up the lie, keep reminiscing with anyone who wants to talk about Sherlock. She takes time off work, both to keep up appearances and because it’s hard to do their work without him, but when she comes back every cop in the 11th wants to come up to her and share some story about Sherlock. She wonders what they think they’re achieving. Do they think that’s comforting?

In some ways, she’s glad she’s getting a dry-run of this. Someday, when he does die—because he will, she can’t pretend he won’t, and it will most likely be before her—she’ll already know to expect all this bullshit. They only care now because he’s gone. Most of these people hated Sherlock when he was alive.

No, he _is_ alive. That’s the part where she thinks she’s going crazy. She’s almost starting to forget that herself. She can only tell Clyde and the bees. “He’ll come home,” she promises Clyde as he roves across her stomach. She’s been letting him out to wander more. Now that Kitty and Archie are back in London, Joan has no one to talk to about it. They can’t talk about Sherlock on the phone or in emails. So Clyde is her indoor confidant now.

Joan goes up to the roof to check on the bees Sherlock named after her. He left her a little guidebook on how to handle them, but she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. He left it in code, of course, because he’s Sherlock. It would take anyone else at least a few tries to crack it, but Joan can read it perfectly. It makes her stomach hurt to read it, but maybe in a good way.

“He’s going to come back,” she whispers to the hive. “Don’t worry.”

The bees don’t seem very bothered. She shakes her head at herself for thinking the bees can be bothered by a human emotion. _Bees aren’t capable of higher intelligent thought, Watson_, she hears Sherlock remind her.

“I have a friend who can take them,” Ms. Hudson says one day when Joan comes down from the roof. “If you’re not sure what else to do.”

“No,” Joan says sharply. She can’t explain herself. She can’t say Sherlock would be furious if he came home and found she’d given away his bees. And besides, they’re _her_ bees. They have her name, and he left them specifically to her in his will. If he were actually dead, she might be kind of annoyed about that, because she’s never expressed any desire to take up beekeeping. But it’s handy now.

Ms. Hudson doesn’t get mad at Joan for snapping. Joan knew she wouldn’t. Ms. Hudson pats Joan’s hand and kisses her hair and says, “I miss him, too.”

Everyone keeps saying that. And Joan knows she’s not the only person who cared about him. _Cares_. Ms. Hudson and Marcus and the Captain and Mason and Harlan and Alfredo and all of them—they do all care about Sherlock. But none of them feel his absence in every waking moment. None of them turn around to tell him something, none of them jolt awake thinking they hear big band music in the library or accordions in the media room, none of them ask an empty kitchen where all the butter knives went.

(They’re in the bathtub, for some reason. She yells out, “Sherlock!” and then swallows hard when she’s only answered with silence.)

Sherlock isn’t dead, but he’s still _gone_, and Joan can’t talk to him, can’t see him, can’t work with him. She doesn’t know where he is. She doesn’t know if he’s tangled up with Moriarty somewhere or if he’s relapsed, away from his support system and his routines. She knows he isn’t taking care of himself like he should be. His PCS is mostly gone, but he really did get shot and go over the railing, so that couldn’t have helped his still-healing brain.

She feels absurdly bereft that someone else pulled the bullet out of his arm and stitched him up. That should’ve been her job. And then she should’ve been checking his stitches and badgering him about changing the dressings and taking his physical therapy slow and easy.

She doesn’t even know what continent he’s on. It would be just like him to go to some remote village with no physical therapist to be found. Then again, he’s been shot before, so maybe he just knows the exercises by heart.

Two months after the fake funeral, Joan is having dinner with her family for her mother’s birthday. Mary isn’t doing as well as they’d all hoped she would be. At one point, she turns to Joan and asks fretfully, “Why isn’t Sherlock here?”

Joan has to grit her teeth and say, for the fiftieth or hundredth or thousandth time in the last two months, “Sherlock died.”

“What?” Mary demands, knocking over her water glass in her distress. “When?”

Joan rubs her temples. Her dad shushes Mary and explains to her while Joan goes into the kitchen to get a rag. She leans against the counter for a second with her eyes closed. She hates lying about this. She hates it even more when it’s to her fragile mother.

“Oh, Joan,” Oren says behind her. “I’m so sorry.”

Joan’s eyes snap open. “I’m fine,” she says on autopilot.

“No, you’re not,” Oren counters. “It’s only been two months. I think I’d be catatonic if I lost Gabrielle.”

Joan huffs. “I wasn’t married to Sherlock.”

“Weren’t you?” Oren asks gently.

“Sherlock and I aren’t sleeping together,” Joan says. “Weren’t. Well, we still aren’t, actually, so you can rest easy about that. It’s not the same.”

Oren shakes his head, eyes sad. “Whatever you say, Joan.”

Maybe he’s right. In a lot of ways, she and Sherlock are basically married. He left everything to her. They’ve been raising Clyde together. They were going to co-parent a kid. No one knows her better than Sherlock, and she doesn’t think she understands anyone else the way she understands Sherlock. She doesn’t feel as comfortable around anyone else the way she does with Sherlock. All the actual romantic relationships she’s ever had pale in comparison to how reliable her relationship with Sherlock is. She always knows Sherlock will be there when she needs him, Shinwell’s funeral notwithstanding. She’s forgiven him for that, considering his brain was literally broken.

They’re partners—what was it Sherlock said once? A package deal. Two people who love each other. Maybe that’s a sort of marriage, in its own way. Sherlock would hate that terminology. He’s softened a bit to the idea of marriage for other people, if he thinks they’re a good match and marriage is something they value. Joan’s long since admitted to herself Sherlock was right about her eschewing traditional relationships.

So fine, maybe, in a way, for lack of better term, they were married. Maybe there’s not a satisfactory word for what they were. Are. It feels much more like a _were_ these days. It hits her, with a painful throb in her chest, that she _is_ mourning Sherlock. She misses him. She doesn’t miss him waking her up by throwing things at her or crashing cymbals in her doorway, but she misses talking to him. She misses bouncing ideas off each other and forcing him to watch sappy movies when she’s had a bad day and covering his mouth when he complains too much about the plot holes.

She misses him so much she even cries a little when she finds an old, forgotten experiment in the back of the fridge. She might be tearing up because it smells so horrifically when she opens the bag, but she’s mostly sure she’s crying because it reminds her of Sherlock.

It doesn’t stop her from throwing whatever the hell it is away. She’s sad, not crazy.

People stop asking about Sherlock after more time goes by. They stop talking about him. Sometimes, she’ll hear a cop say with a sigh, “Too bad that weird Holmes guy isn’t here to help us—” and cut himself off when he sees her, but it makes her smile.

“I wish he was here, too,” she tells one fresh-faced kid she vaguely remembers from around the bullpen. He couldn’t have been out of the Academy for longer than a month when they staged the whole thing, but Sherlock does leave quite the impression.

“Sorry,” he says, worried he hurt her feelings or something.

She just shrugs. “Whether you talk about him or not, I always miss him.”

“Hey,” Marcus says. He’s developed some kind of sixth sense for when someone is talking to Joan about Sherlock. He thinks she needs him to come get her out of these conversations. She doesn’t really mind either way. She puts it on her mental list of things to tell Sherlock about when she can. He’d get a kick out of Marcus whisking her away. He’d say something about wishing Marcus would do that for him when he’s stuck talking to some of the patrolmen they have to deal with from time to time. He’d be glad someone’s watching out for her, at any rate.

“It’s okay,” Joan promises Marcus. “It’s nice to talk about him.”

“It is?” Marcus asks. “Gregson and I thought…”

She understands now, all the guilty looks whenever anyone mentions Sherlock around her. They’ve all been given strict instructions to keep their mouths shut. She laughs a little. “I still live in our house, Marcus,” she points out. “It’s not like I forgot.”

He huffs. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “Just didn’t want anyone bothering you about it.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” she tells him honestly. “I think it’s worse when I have to pretend he was never here at all.”

“That makes sense,” Marcus says. “I’ve been thinking…” He bites his lip and glances over his shoulder. “I’ve been thinking about asking Chantal to marry me,” he says quietly. “But it felt wrong. I would’ve wanted him to be there.”

Joan’s chest hurts. She wants to tell him if he waits long enough, Sherlock _can_ be there. But she can’t say that. She just smiles and throws her arms around Marcus.

“Marcus, that’s wonderful. Don’t hold back, okay? Besides, it’s probably better he’s not here. He might try to talk you out of it.”

Marcus laughs. “He probably would.”

Joan works and she talks to Kitty and she has dinner with her parents. Lin says over coffee one day, “So…the brownstone.”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to sell it?” Lin asks tentatively. “I’m not saying that because I’d want to be the one to sell it. I just mean—isn’t it kind of sad? Being there without him?”

“Yeah, it is,” Joan says easily. “But I can’t leave. It’s my home.”

Lin doesn’t understand. For one thing, she doesn’t understand that Sherlock will be coming back. But more than that, she doesn’t understand why Joan would want to cling to memories. Joan wants to point out right now memories are all she has.

Honestly, she expected more. She expected carrier pigeons or smoke signals or something like that. They can’t use any normal means of communication, sure, but she realizes, ashamed, she’s _mad_ at him, because if he really wanted to, he could find a way to get in touch. This is Sherlock. He could find a way she’s never even heard of. She shakes her head at herself. He had to fake his own death and go on the run. He did that to put an end to Reichenbach, to save countless lives. To save _her_. She can’t be mad at him for that.

She still is though, just a little. It’s small enough that she can push the feeling down, bury it deep with all her other repressed emotions. Maybe she’ll tell him about it when he gets back. He’ll forgive her. He’ll probably apologize.

Odin Reichenbach is not actually going to be convicted of murdering Sherlock. They knew that all along. Without a body, it’s virtually impossible. But they get to search his home, his business, his computers. In all these months, that’s what they’ve been doing. It’s been taking so long because there’s such an avalanche of evidence. But then they find it, the needle in the haystack. They find proof of the hits he ordered, all the staged suicides and all the people he turned into assassins for hire.

Nine months after Sherlock had to run, Odin Reichenbach accepts a plea deal. Joan goes home and she sits in the library with her eyes closed for half an hour, just breathing. She hears something slide under the door. Sherlock bolted the mail slot shut a long time ago, probably in the throes of a heroin-induced paranoia. And Joan went through and actually weatherproofed all the doors and windows years ago when she realized Sherlock thought putting on more layers and building up the fire counted as weatherproofing. Nothing should be able to get under the door.

Joan races to the front door. Before she touches the envelope on the floor, she throws the door open, but there’s no one there. She frowns as she closes and locks the door, and then she frowns down at the envelope. She doesn’t think anyone would send her some kind of airborne pathogen today. It would be way too easy to trace back to Reichenbach. She shouldn’t just _open_ it, though. Reichenbach isn’t the only one who’d want to kill her, and someone could know how easily it would be to frame him today. Plenty of people who hate Joan are smart enough to make that connection.

She rolls her eyes at herself a little. She hasn’t made any big-time enemies like that lately, and Moriarty sent a pretty clear message through the crime community when she took out Elena a few years ago. No one high-level enough to send Joan anthrax would want to deal with crossing Moriarty.

Still, she opens the envelope carefully, hesitantly. Just because she’s being logical doesn’t mean she needs to be rash. There’s a card inside. Her heart leaps when she realizes what she’s looking at. The card has a tortoise on the front. A tortoise that looks just like Clyde. Her hands start to shake and she drops the envelope in her haste to open the card.

There’s just one line of writing. It’s only three letters. There’s no signature, and the handwriting is unfamiliar, but it doesn’t matter. She knows it’s from Sherlock. She starts to cry, a smile breaking over her face. She reads the letters again and another time and then she runs to tell Clyde. She carries the card with her, refusing to let it out of her sight in case it somehow disappears when she’s not looking at it. Just before she goes to sleep, she touches the letters inside the card again, excited and comforted and happy. She can finally stop mourning. She can stop missing him. He’s coming back, just like she always knew he would. Inside the card, he made her a promise.

_CUS._

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely can't remember if Marcus and Chantal broke up?? I feel like we haven't heard anything about her in a while. But if they did and I'm totally blanking on that, just assume they got back together or something lol.
> 
> [my tumblr](http://biblionerd07.tumblr.com)


End file.
